“I think you’re about to tell me.”
This time when more papers came out, he slid forward in his chair a few inches. I heard the creak. It seemed actually to come from inside his body, not from the chair.
“It’s a family history excerpt, sir. One of those privately printed works; family wants Granddad commemorated. A CEO wants a book to give his kids. This one was commissioned by the head of a Sacramento software company, great-great-grandson of E.E. Worth. The guy hired a writer to do his autobiography. You pay the writer fifty thousand dollars and get your own book, but these things still get cataloged by the Library of Congress. That’s where I found this.”
The director said nothing.
I unfolded the pages, read out loud:
My inspiration has always been my great-great-grandfather, E.E. Worth, who looms in our family history. After the Spanish flu first appeared at Fort Riley, great-great-grandfather tirelessly threw himself into research to try to cure it. It was almost as if, my dad told me, E.E. blamed himself for the disease breaking out, for the death of his infant son Kyle from the illness. E.E. poured all his profits into the search for an antidote. Long after the outbreak subsided, he spent nights in his lab, insisting that one day the disease would come back, that mankind would need a cure.
Toward the end of his life, feeble minded, he would break into tears and tell doctors that he’d caused the Spanish flu; he had done experiments with pigs that went bad, and caused soldiers to get sick… but that he had prayed to God and that God had finally forgiven him and let him discover an antidote, and it sat in the company freezers.
He never lost his preoccupation with the flu.
And while it is true that he had dementia, my dad drilled into me that even in the grip of insanity, E.E. remained dedicated to helping humanity. He was our example. His quest to find a cure for that long-dead plague made me equally committed to humanitarian causes, which is why…
I looked up. “And so forth,” I said.
The director relaxed, slid his chair back, crossed his legs. “A family history?” he said. “Uncorroborated? An old man babbling that he created the flu? Please. You ought to hear the stories at my dinner table. By the time they’re told for the fifth time, they have no resemblance to the truth.”
I said nothing. I just waited.
At length, the director broke the silence. But he seemed easier, as if danger had approached and slid past. “Joe, think, if someone had an antidote for this disease back in the 1930s, don’t you think they would have patented it, advertised it?”
“Why? Patents are only good for twenty years. He had a cure for a disease that no longer existed! If they patented the drug in 1930, there was a good chance that by the time the disease returned, they wouldn’t own the patent anymore. So they kept it quiet. It didn’t hurt to put the thing in a freezer, and wait until it was needed. You yourself said many times, All diseases eventually come back.”
“Ah, ties in with your theory, that the melting Arctic will rerelease old diseases.”
“It’s not a theory after what just happened.”
“So you’re actually saying,” he said, grinning now, “that this alleged cure sat in company freezers, passed from corporation to corporation for eighty years, and finally lands up with this company’s subsidiary in China.”
“You needed to keep it a secret,” I said, flourishing the newspaper headline about the announced vaccination program, “until you knew it worked. So you told the Chinese — your own guys — to send the antidote. Maybe you already knew you were going back to work in the company. Maybe you negotiated the job when you realized what was happening. Either way you had access to old records. You knew about the outbreak before I did. You had time to make the call. You had the Chinese mislabel the stuff in case it didn’t work, to protect the formula. If it didn’t work, no one would know. You’d go back to waiting. If it did work, you’d capitalize on the drug.”
He broke out laughing. He stood up.
“If there weren’t so many holes in this,” he said, “I’d be offended. But tell me, Joe, if there was such superb coordination between New York and China, why did the Chinese almost blow you to smithereens, instead of just handing over the drug? Not exactly self-interest!”
“That bothered me, too, at first. But then I realized the answer. It’s because someone made a mistake. You treated Chinese executives the way you’d treat American ones. You forgot that in China, the military owns companies, especially ones that deal with drugs for the military. By alerting them, you were also unwittingly letting the Chinese Navy know that a U.S. sub was out of commission.”
“Oh, I find this incredible!”
“And their military people,” I continued, “wanted it all. The Montana’s torpedoes for the Navy. The drug profits for the company, for themselves. Here’s a photo Andrew’s boys found of a board of directors’ meeting of Jade. See these guys here? An admiral. A general. Heavy on the military side, sir. I’m guessing that the Chinese double-crossed you. They tried to get both, the sub and the profits. Maybe they fought over it. After all, the original admiral who gave Zhou instructions was replaced after the fighting, right?”
“And that’s your theory,” said the director.
“Yes.”
“Well, I have an old college roommate who is now a film producer in Los Angeles, and he would probably like this idea for a cute science fiction piece.”
“Good, because then I could give him the real film we found, did I mention that? Especially the first part, which wasn’t really blank, sir. We lied to you. It showed the program at Fort Riley, the creation of the Spanish flu, which we tried to introduce into Russia. That film’s on about two hundred cell phones now, ready to go out.”
This was the bluff I’d been building up to since the session started. It had to come at exactly the right moment, and I watched the bomb hit home. There was no mistaking the reaction. He was an accomplished dissembler, but he’d been sure I’d used all my ammunition, he’d allowed himself to relax, think he’d beaten me, I was done, and now just for an instant the blood drained from his face and his fingers clawed at the sides of his chair.
He saw me see it. He knew that words were useless. He knew that he’d just admitted it, and that lies would not convince me otherwise anymore. He canted his head, seemed more like a professor regarding an especially smart student, and then his smile broadened approvingly.
“Was that the truth, Joe? Copies?”
“Yes.”
“Uh-huh. Then by the way, where is the original first part? Throw it out? Hide it? Oh well, either way, that was very well done. I always admired the way you could put things together. Kudos, man.”
I felt the rage engulf me then. That he could have sent in the antidote from the first moment. That he could have avoided the suffering and death. That he’d played me and Eddie for fools and almost killed us and two hundred other people, almost started a war.
But the director seemed more proud than embarrassed. He opened his top desk drawer, extracted a report, tossed the thing on his blotter, backward, so I could see the title of the White House executive order:
300 MILLION DOSES TO BE DISTRIBUTED.
“All Americans will be protected, Joe, for the rest of their lives. Like polio vaccinations. Or typhoid. Thanks to you, to this, we’re saving lives.”